Merriam-Webster - The Awkward Case of "His or Her" lyrics

Welcome to Ask the Editor. I'm Emily Brewster, an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster. Facebook recently changed the updates like "Noah Webster commented on their own photo" to the more natural-sounding "Noah Webster commented on his own photo"—which makes good sense, because Facebook knows the gender of its users. But what about using the traditionally plural "their" to refer to a single person? Is saying "One of your friends commented on their own photo" really so bad? For a long time, the answer to that question was clearly "No." Observe the following from the 1611 King James Version of the Bible: ("... if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespa**es."—Matthew 18:35) One reason for favoring the plural pronoun is that indefinite pronouns like "everyone" usually imply a plural, even if they're grammatically singular. Another is the lack of gender identification that indefinite pronouns and words like "friend" share with "they," "their," and "them." But most of us were taught to avoid "they" in such cases and to use "he" instead. This is thanks to a group of 18th-century grammarians who decided that indefinite pronouns like "everyone" are always grammatically singular, and that masculine singular pronouns should be used for reference to them. The same went for non-gender-specific singular nouns like "friend." To them, inaccuracy of gender was less troublesome than inaccuracy of number, and so we got "Everyone should do his best." Today, we're more likely to use the gender-balanced "his or her"—"Everyone should do his or her best." That's fine until we end up with things like "Everyone should do his or her best in whatever situations he or she finds himself or herself in." Of course, there is always "You should do your best" or "People should do their best," but all this effort to avoid a usage that's centuries old strikes some of us as strange. Perhaps "Everyone should just do their best in the situations they find themselves in"—even if their best involves "they" as a singular pronoun. For more from our Ask the Editor series, visit merriam-webster.com.